Web Conversations About Complementary and Alternative Medicines and Cancer: Content and Sentiment Analysis

Mazzocut, Mauro; Truccolo, Ivana; Antonini, Marialuisa; Rinaldi, Fabio; Omero, Paolo; Ferrarin, Emanuela; Paoli, Paolo De; Tasso, Carlo

doi:10.2196/jmir.5521

Cited by 44 publications

(34 citation statements)

References 47 publications

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“…The sheer volume of discussions on social media sites dedicated to parenting along with the knowledge that many people use Internet resources as their first line of health care information mean that these forums deserve ongoing attention [39,48]. Identifying the vaccine exemption narrative framework and its activation through individual storytelling is an important step in understanding how people discuss this topic on these sites.…”

Section: Discussionmentioning

confidence: 99%

“…Beyond simply identifying the main topics of discussion on the sites, we discovered the underlying narrative frameworks that explain the stories circulating in these various discussions, an approach that extends recent work on personal experience and health knowledge exchange in Internet forums [12-16]. In addition to delineating the narrative framework that parents activate in their storytelling, we provided a fine-grained view of actant interactions and relationships in these stories, offering insight into individuals’ shifting attitudes toward vaccination.…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

See 1 more Smart Citation

“Mommy Blogs” and the Vaccination Exemption Narrative: Results From A Machine-Learning Approach for Story Aggregation on Parenting Social Media Sites

Tangherlini¹,

Roychowdhury²,

Glenn³

et al. 2016

JMIR Public Health Surveill

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BackgroundSocial media offer an unprecedented opportunity to explore how people talk about health care at a very large scale. Numerous studies have shown the importance of websites with user forums for people seeking information related to health. Parents turn to some of these sites, colloquially referred to as “mommy blogs,” to share concerns about children’s health care, including vaccination. Although substantial work has considered the role of social media, particularly Twitter, in discussions of vaccination and other health care–related issues, there has been little work on describing the underlying structure of these discussions and the role of persuasive storytelling, particularly on sites with no limits on post length. Understanding the role of persuasive storytelling at Internet scale provides useful insight into how people discuss vaccinations, including exemption-seeking behavior, which has been tied to a recent diminution of herd immunity in some communities.ObjectiveTo develop an automated and scalable machine-learning method for story aggregation on social media sites dedicated to discussions of parenting. We wanted to discover the aggregate narrative frameworks to which individuals, through their exchange of experiences and commentary, contribute over time in a particular topic domain. We also wanted to characterize temporal trends in these narrative frameworks on the sites over the study period.MethodsTo ensure that our data capture long-term discussions and not short-term reactions to recent events, we developed a dataset of 1.99 million posts contributed by 40,056 users and viewed 20.12 million times indexed from 2 parenting sites over a period of 105 months. Using probabilistic methods, we determined the topics of discussion on these parenting sites. We developed a generative statistical-mechanical narrative model to automatically extract the underlying stories and story fragments from millions of posts. We aggregated the stories into an overarching narrative framework graph. In our model, stories were represented as network graphs with actants as nodes and their various relationships as edges. We estimated the latent stories circulating on these sites by modeling the posts as a sampling of the hidden narrative framework graph. Temporal trends were examined based on monthly user-poststatistics.ResultsWe discovered that discussions of exemption from vaccination requirements are highly represented. We found a strong narrative framework related to exemption seeking and a culture of distrust of government and medical institutions. Various posts reinforced part of the narrative framework graph in which parents, medical professionals, and religious institutions emerged as key nodes, and exemption seeking emerged as an important edge. In the aggregate story, parents used religion or belief to acquire exemptions to protect their children from vaccines that are required by schools or government institutions, but (allegedly) cause adverse reactions such as autism, pain, compromised immunity, and even dea...

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Section: Discussionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

“Mommy Blogs” and the Vaccination Exemption Narrative: Results From A Machine-Learning Approach for Story Aggregation on Parenting Social Media Sites

Tangherlini¹,

Roychowdhury²,

Glenn³

et al. 2016

JMIR Public Health Surveill

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“…This may be particularly important for breaking through the “noise” of nonevidence-based information available on social media. In a study of Web postings by Italians, Mazzocut et al [4] showed that patients frequently search for and post items related to alternative therapies for cancer treatment, many of which involve nutrition, showing that nutrition therapies are a topic of conversation on social media.…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Assessing the Viability of Social Media for Disseminating Evidence-Based Nutrition Practice Guideline Through Content Analysis of Twitter Messages and Health Professional Interviews: An Observational Study

et al. 2016

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BackgroundGiven the high penetration of social media use, social media has been proposed as a method for the dissemination of information to health professionals and patients. This study explored the potential for social media dissemination of the Academy of Nutrition and Dietetics Evidence-Based Nutrition Practice Guideline (EBNPG) for Heart Failure (HF).ObjectivesThe objectives were to (1) describe the existing social media content on HF, including message content, source, and target audience, and (2) describe the attitude of physicians and registered dietitian nutritionists (RDNs) who care for outpatient HF patients toward the use of social media as a method to obtain information for themselves and to share this information with patients.MethodsThe methods were divided into 2 parts. Part 1 involved conducting a content analysis of tweets related to HF, which were downloaded from Twitonomy and assigned codes for message content (19 codes), source (9 codes), and target audience (9 codes); code frequency was described. A comparison in the popularity of tweets (those marked as favorites or retweeted) based on applied codes was made using t tests. Part 2 involved conducting phone interviews with RDNs and physicians to describe health professionals’ attitude toward the use of social media to communicate general health information and information specifically related to the HF EBNPG. Interviews were transcribed and coded; exemplar quotes representing frequent themes are presented.ResultsThe sample included 294 original tweets with the hashtag “#heartfailure.” The most frequent message content codes were “HF awareness” (166/294, 56.5%) and “patient support” (97/294, 33.0%). The most frequent source codes were “professional, government, patient advocacy organization, or charity” (112/277, 40.4%) and “patient or family” (105/277, 37.9%). The most frequent target audience codes were “unable to identify” (111/277, 40.1%) and “other” (55/277, 19.9%). Significant differences were found in the popularity of tweets with (mean 1, SD 1.3 favorites) or without (mean 0.7, SD 1.3 favorites), the content code being “HF research” (P=.049). Tweets with the source code “professional, government, patient advocacy organizations, or charities” were significantly more likely to be marked as a favorite and retweeted than those without this source code (mean 1.2, SD 1.4 vs mean 0.8, SD 1.2, P=.03) and (mean 1.5, SD 1.8 vs mean 0.9, SD 2.0, P=.03). Interview participants believed that social media was a useful way to gather professional information. They did not believe that social media was useful for communicating with patients due to privacy concerns and the fact that the information had to be kept general rather than be tailored for a specific patient and the belief that their patients did not use social media or technology.ConclusionsExisting Twitter content related to HF comes from a combination of patients and evidence-based organizations; however, there is little nutrition content. That gap may present an opportunity for EBNPG dissem...

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“…In 2009, 35% of Internet users looked online for information about alternative treatments, up from 28% in 2002 [8]. People also access websites, forums, blogs, online communities, and social networks to discuss CIH [9].…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Assessing the Quality of Websites Relating to Complementary and Integrative Health: A Review of Five Domains (Preprint)

Chen¹,

Taylor-Swanson²,

Buie³

et al. 2018

Preprint

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Web Conversations About Complementary and Alternative Medicines and Cancer: Content and Sentiment Analysis

Cited by 44 publications

References 47 publications

“Mommy Blogs” and the Vaccination Exemption Narrative: Results From A Machine-Learning Approach for Story Aggregation on Parenting Social Media Sites

“Mommy Blogs” and the Vaccination Exemption Narrative: Results From A Machine-Learning Approach for Story Aggregation on Parenting Social Media Sites

Assessing the Viability of Social Media for Disseminating Evidence-Based Nutrition Practice Guideline Through Content Analysis of Twitter Messages and Health Professional Interviews: An Observational Study

Assessing the Quality of Websites Relating to Complementary and Integrative Health: A Review of Five Domains (Preprint)

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